Experimental Philosophy, Folk Metaethics and Qualitative Methods

This paper describes a novel method of empirically investigating philosophical questions, which I term ‘Qualitative Empirical Philosophy,’ involving the use of semi-structured interviews. This offers an extension and a critique of ‘Experimental Philosophy’ and its use of survey methodology. Here I focus on the application of these methods to the study of folk metaethical relativism. I argue that surveys face severe challenges in ensuring subject comprehension, capturing the details of their views, and are simply incapable of detecting some plausible metaethical positions, whereas qualitative methods have several advantages.